'Marxist sociologist Dave Bedggood has used the term 'Polynesian mode of production' to describe the hybrid economic system that flourished in the Waikato Kingdom in the 1850s and early 1860s, and which later thrived in the famous mini-state of Parihaka. The inhabitants of the Waikato Kingdom and of Parihaka held and worked their land in common, but exported their products to Pakeha capitalist enclaves like Auckland. They thus participated in the capitalist economy without sacrificing traditional forms of social organisation.'
It is great to hear about Dave, who I knew in London twenty years ago. I would be interested to hear more about the 'Polynesian mode of production'. Still, Jairus Banaji made a good argument against those development economists who characterised the persistence of traditional forms of social organisation in the margins of capitalism as discrete 'modes of production'.
Banaji developed his argument in a chapter in 'Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India' by Patnaik et al, Lahore, 1978, copied here (http://www.jstor.org/pss/4365853) and in Capital and Class # 3, copied here: 'The colonial peasants integrated into commodity production by a process called "forced commercialization" entered capitalist relations of production behind the backs of their existing forms of production : here capitalist production thus retained a "surface layer", an "appearance" of superceded forms of economy, the peasants "retained the external attributes of independent producers" (Preobrazhensky, 1965, p . 186), and the forms of reproduction of labour-power retained the appearance of distinct, even if "dependent", forms of production.' http://anti-politics.net/discussion/Jairus_Banaji.pdf p 35